The highest of distinctions is service to others.
The queen, like Mrs Thatcher, was almost completely shaped by her father’s philosophical inheritance. George VI was the reluctant king who only assumed the throne when his brother abdicated. His was a life spent resisting reform and viewing progress with deep suspicion. Thatcher’s father couldn’t have been more different, and this contrast made the two women fundamentally at odds in convictions and outlook. As prime minister, Mrs Thatcher wanted to embrace change and looked to America for inspiration. The queen closed her eyes to it until she was forced to respond.
Life for the queen and her prime minister was also viewed from two very different social vantage points, and the mutual bemusement of both women was largely derived from that old British chestnut – class. The Grantham woman, who transformed herself with a great deal of effort into a suburban lady in pearls, didn’t see the world from the same place as a monarch with an ancient lineage dating back to William the Conqueror.
Elizabeth II would always view Margaret Thatcher as temporary. Politicians throughout her life had come and gone; and often it ended badly for them. By contrast, the monarchy stood for stability and continuity; two key factors that bred enormous confidence and security. Her Majesty had everything in life handed to her on a silver plate and the view from Windsor Castle was far more rarefied than the view from behind a grocery store counter. Thatcher, like her father, had to fight for everything, every day of her life. It was a habit she found impossible to break. Margaret had to become somebody from scratch. Elizabeth had no experience or real understanding of that.
During the period when Mrs Thatcher was growing up in a tiny flat with an outside toilet, life for the queen-in-waiting had been very different. Princess Elizabeth’s world only existed for most people, including Margaret Thatcher, in the ‘Neverland’ realm of Hollywood films and fiction. ‘Lilibet’, as she was known to her family, grew up in a carefree cocoon of privilege, wealth and isolation from the real world, surrounded by ponies, dogs, maids, footmen, nannies, governesses and tutors. When young high-born playmates visited they had to curtsy or bow and call her ma’am.1
The British royal family were a race apart, and their world hadn’t changed much since Queen Victoria had occupied the throne. They lived in a succession of great houses, palaces and castles. Their collection of jewels and paintings was unrivalled. There was an army of servants, and the royal yacht alone had thirty. Every comfort and luxury was ministered to them by a select band of utterly loyal courtiers, drawn from the upper classes, who looked upon court service as a combination of hereditary duty and religious devotion. The monarch was at the apex of this world. It was what writer and broadcaster Andrew Marr has called ‘a lost world of understatement’ where people knew their place and protocol so well that these things were unspoken.2
During Elizabeth’s childhood, class, station, title, degree and address still mattered very much. Inclusion in this society was by right of background alone. Originally, it had never been thought that Elizabeth would inherit the throne. Born Princess Elizabeth of York, she was only the daughter of the second son and ‘spare heir’, Bertie, the Duke of York. Then a twice divorced American called Wallis Simpson appeared on the scene, and everything changed. Edward VIII’s decision to marry Mrs Simpson threw the royal family into turmoil and transformed Princess Elizabeth’s prospects. In abdicating as king, her uncle, Edward VIII, made Elizabeth’s father king, and Elizabeth the heir presumptive. This meant that, unless her father had a male heir, she would be the next monarch.
As the former King-Emperor went into exile with the new title of the Duke of Windsor, even his mother, Queen Mary, turned her back on him. It was a brutal demotion, from the sovereign of the British Empire which covered almost a quarter of the world, to a virtual nobody. The new Duke of Windsor later described his mother as having ‘ice in her veins’.
For some years, Queen Mary had been drawing closer to her second son and working against her eldest who, in her eyes, was proving a big disappointment. Mary felt that Edward VIII was irresponsible and a ‘gadfly’. He was having affairs with married women, gambling, travelling for fun, partying, clubbing with his racy circle of friends, suggesting sweeping reforms and living the sort of life she condemned as sinful.
The old queen had felt for some time before the abdication that her younger son Bertie, the Duke of York, and his wife, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, could become the quintessential royal family. They would be a living example of the monarchy that embodied all the radiant domestic virtues she valued. Lady Elizabeth was the daughter of an earl and cousin of a duke, and therefore perfect royal marriage material, unlike the American divorcee Mrs Simpson. Queen Mary realised their enormous potential and sanctioned an attempt to glamorise the young couple and publicise them further with a documentary film. The programme depicted Bertie, slim, serious and neatly dressed, with his adoring wife, smiling sweetly. His daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, were perfectly behaved and immaculately dressed in party frocks, playing together. The family was being promoted and exposed to the media.
Privileged royal-watchers from selected newspapers were invited to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle to see the two princesses at play or at their school lessons. Others came to watch the Yorks’ own Christmas pantomime at Windsor, starring, of course, the two princesses.3 Queen Mary was helping establish a substitute royal family, should the first son prove wanting.
Upon his accession as Edward VIII, the new king immediately swept in a series of reforms to Buckingham Palace. He slashed costs at Balmoral and Sandringham, suggested a more simple coronation ceremony, and he walked in the streets meeting his people, saying famously, ‘something must be done’ about the unemployed. All this was an attitude to refashion the royal institution rather than a serious agenda of modernisation. He was often contrary, mulish and willful. Edward found it difficult to concentrate, lacked application and was spoilt rotten by his cronies. Despite all these weaknesses, he was nevertheless a popular national figure. He also had the good fortune to inherit the blond good looks of his Danish grandmother, Queen Alexandra, and the intelligence of his grandfather, Edward VII. He was a good linguist, a natural charmer and popular with women.
Had the new king stopped to think, he would have realised that, in trying to change too much so quickly, Edward was building up enormous trouble for himself, not just in the royal household, but elsewhere in the Establishment, most notably with the Church of England, under the iron rule of Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang. Lang was a close friend of the York family and had even married Bertie and Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey. He also wanted to play a central role in the development of the so-called ‘family monarchy’. Despite his own, probably non-practising, homosexuality,4 the Archbishop led the opposition to the reform of the divorce laws under the guise of defending the institution of marriage. Queen Victoria had turned the British monarchy into a monarchy of duty. Archbishop Lang added a fresh responsibility, to have a flawless marriage. The Duke and Duchess of York fitted his brief perfectly. The new king didn’t.
Much to Archbishop Lang’s frustration, Edward VIII became a global star, much like Princess Diana in the 1980s. On spectacularly co-ordinated world tours of the British Empire, Edward VIII flaunted his sex appeal, glad-handed the people, defied protocol and embraced his celebrity status as a royal rebel. It was an unprecedented performance in a family noted for its dullness, and it didn’t go down terribly well with the archbishop and his agenda for using the monarchy to put religion back into the centre of British life.
The Establishment cabal surrounding Buckingham Palace, with Lang at its core, were entrenched and sanctimoniously confident of their power; they wanted to be kingmakers. Before long they were telling all who would listen that Edward VIII was unfit to be king, and that the Duke and Duchess of York were better suited for the role.
The Establishment now decided on a campaign of denigration to bring down the pro-reform king.5 Archbishop Lang’s plot enjoyed the support of Lord Reith at the BBC, Geoffrey Dawson at The Times and various heads of government across the Commonwealth. By attempting to make Wallis Simpson queen, Edward simply played into their hands. It was no contest, and before the year was out, Edward VIII had abdicated and the more malleable Yorks were enthroned.
Together with their two daughters, they moved out of their private house near Green Park into Buckingham Palace. Their new palace home was a vast, grey and rather soulless building, more like a bank headquarters, with magnificent reception rooms and endless corridors. It was a big step up for Bertie and Elizabeth, for in royal circles sovereignty confers a sacred status on its holders. Bertie made the decision to be called King George VI, adopting his father’s name as a symbol of stability and continuity. The new King-Emperor and Queen-Empress had no appetite for change, something that delighted most members of the royal household.6
‘Does that mean you will have to be the next queen?’ asked her sister, Princess Margaret Rose.
‘Yes, someday,’ Elizabeth replied.
‘Poor you,’ said her sister.7
The new titles and position were an enormous strain on Elizabeth’s father. George VI was physically frail and plagued by anxiety over the public duties he would be expected to fulfill throughout the vast British Empire. All his life he had been compared unfavourably to his dazzling elder brother, who had charmed royal courtiers from the outset. One of them, Lord Esher, dismissed the unfortunate younger brother as ‘backward but sweet’.8 It was not a propitious verdict with which to start life. George VI was a slower and rather dimmer version of what people imagined a king should be. He was almost bottom of his school class, passing sixty-eighth out of sixty-nine pupils in his final school examination. He was knock-kneed and plagued with a bad stammer. But he did have the application, stamina and, at the age of 17, had become a convinced Christian. In short, the two brothers were the hare and the tortoise.9
However, this rather unimposing man who became king was the most important influence on the young Princess Elizabeth. It was her father who impressed her with his sense of duty and his conscientiousness. To understand her, you have to get to grips with him. He became her role model as monarch. Elizabeth noticed how methodical her father was in all official matters, even opening and reading his mail. He loved routine, for a king, the unchanging schedule was akin to a commitment. She saw him work gruelling hours at a job he never wanted. She saw him wrestle with his speech impediment and attend to all his duties with perseverance. Elizabeth would follow his ideals when she took the crown herself.10
Until their coronation, neither Bertie (now George VI) nor his wife (now Queen Elizabeth) had led particularly taxing lives. Apart from the occasional royal engagement they enjoyed the existence of idle aristocrats. As relatively minor members of the royal family, little had been expected of them. Art historian Kenneth Clark, a close friend and alleged lover of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had been ‘shocked to see how little she did with [the] day; she never rose before 11’.11 Before the Second World War aristocratic life was effectively one long party that rotated around the annual London season and its balls, dances, dinners, luncheons, picnics, hunting, shooting and fishing functions. Although no one in the aristocracy worked, they were not footloose. They had a duty to maintain an active social life and, at the height of the season, that could mean attending three or four balls a night. Socialising was not only about pleasure, though it was focused around pleasant events, it was a way of confirming worth and status through connections. For an earl’s daughter to marry a royal duke was the equivalent of an office promotion today. It was serious business, disguised as frivolity.
The Second World War changed everything for the ruling class, and George VI in particular. Sir Winston Churchill would state, the king ‘lived through every minute of this struggle with a heart that never quavered and a spirit undaunted’.12 From the moment when, six hours after the declaration of war on Germany on Sunday, 3 September 1939, the king donned uniform to broadcast to the empire, he became the focus of intense loyalty and identification on the part of millions globally.13 He was now a war leader. However, George VI’s relationship with his prime minister, Winston Churchill, was uneasy. Churchill had been one of the Duke of Windsor’s most avid supporters, and neither George nor Elizabeth were keen for him to become prime minister. There was mutual suspicion on both sides. The king’s official biographer went so far as to describe the new king as ‘bitterly opposed’ to Churchill’s appointment.14 And the new king wasn’t above partisan politics.
Although he wasn’t as pro-German as his brother, the Duke of Windsor, he was a major appeaser. When the previous prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned from his meeting with Hitler in 1938 promising peace in our time, he was paraded on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the king and queen in front of huge waving crowds. It was an act of political partisanship worthy of Queen Victoria at her most unconstrained.15 Once the war started, Churchill and the king were, to some degree, rivals for the role as a symbolic figurehead for the war effort. George was temperamentally unsuited for the task and viewed Churchill’s status as a national icon with a degree of jealousy. Things came to a head when Churchill, with customary bravado, announced his plans to go to France after the first wave of troops in the D-day landings. Determined not to be outdone, the king scotched the scheme by threatening to accompany him. In the event, once the beaches in Normandy were secure, both the king and prime minister visited separately.
In the end, the war became as much of a public relations coup for George VI as victory in the Falklands was for Margaret Thatcher in 1982, projecting an image of royalty as a unifying symbol in a way that could never have been achieved in peacetime.16
While Churchill and her father were jockeying for status, Princess Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret, spent most of the war at Windsor. They lived in the Brunswick Tower, a strongly built part of the castle, while their parents stayed at Buckingham Palace throughout the week. More than 300 high explosive bombs fell around Windsor Castle before the war ended. When the air-raid sirens sounded the girls were hurried down into the basement for refuge. They took with them little suitcases containing their favourite dolls, a book and their diaries. They slept in a two tier bunk which had been installed beneath the castle, where all the royal treasures, priceless paintings, furniture, tapestries and silver were also sheltered. The Crown jewels were wrapped in newspaper, tied with string and hidden in the vault ready to be taken to a ship in Liverpool. Along with the princesses, these valuables would sail for Canada should the need arise.
Elizabeth was 13 when the war started, and 19 when Japan finally surrendered. Having established the monarchy as the symbol of a united Britain, her father now had to ensure that it wasn’t viewed as part of the old class structure (he never quite succeeded at this). The massive vote for Labour in the 1945 general election indicated a general desire to sweep away the old hierarchy.17 The king knew they had to change. However, socialism and the house of Windsor proved not unhappy bedfellows and George VI got on particularly well with the unassuming Labour leader, Clement Attlee. They had much in common; both were quiet men with a strong sense of national duty.
Elizabeth, unlike her father, knew from an early age that she was destined to be queen. She was brought up to regard her future role with the seriousness of a zealot, embracing its religious significance, as it came with the role of Supreme Governor of the Church of England, as part of the job description. This burden seems to have made her an extraordinarily solemn and serious little girl, in contrast with her sister, Princess Margaret, who was frivolous and an enormous flirt. Margaret resembled, in many ways, her disgraced ‘Uncle David’, the Duke of Windsor. Both royal sisters lived in a narrow little world and bore the unmistakable stamp of the debutante. Their lifestyle revolved around the London season, country houses, horses, the racecourse, the grouse moor, canasta and the occasional royal tour. They socialised with a single social type, the landed class.18
George VI was intensely possessive about his daughters, treating Margaret as a spoilt plaything while Elizabeth was trained to have an elevated, almost Victorian, view of her role. Elizabeth reminded many members of the royal family, and the household, of Queen Victoria. Attending her confirmation in 1942, the Countess of Airlie observed her ‘grave little face under a small white net veil’ and felt ‘the carriage of the head was unequalled, and there was about her that indescribable something that Queen Victoria had’. Lady Airlie concluded that this was the ‘air of majesty’.19
Eleanor Roosevelt also commented on Elizabeth’s ‘serious nature’. She felt she was a child with a great deal of ‘character and personality’.20 Queen Mary noticed the likeness between Victoria and Elizabeth, and that the princess had adopted the regal habit of either staring hard at a person who said anything she disliked or ignoring them completely.21
Historian and country house expert, Jamie Lees-Milne, said Princess Elizabeth was ‘imperious’. He described a scene where the little girl told a vicar that she disliked part of his sermon. Elizabeth once even alluded to her mother as a ‘commoner’, noting that she had been born merely Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and not a royal princess.22 In her memoirs, her governess Marion Crawford related how Elizabeth, after her inspection of the Grenadier Guards, was very critical. An officer had to explain, via her governess, that this was not appropriate.23 It made a lasting impression on the men, with half of them refusing in later years to contribute to her wedding gift.24
Elizabeth would never get to be queen and empress like Victoria and her own ‘commoner’ mother. In post-war Britain, George VI had to put on a brave face and accept radical social changes even if they included the virtual dissolution of the British Empire. Burma was the first to go, followed by Ireland, then India declared itself to be a democratic republic, but unlike Ireland it was prepared to acknowledge George VI as Head of the Commonwealth, but not as Emperor of India. The king quickly recognised that Britain was now a second-class power, but shrewdly saw a continuing role for the imperial monarchy as Head of the Commonwealth. He therefore embraced the idea of the New Commonwealth, which was to replace the old empire, as a free association of self-governing nations for which the Crown would provide the link.
He also saw the importance of switching British interests away from the Far East to Africa.25 On 1 February 1947, the king, with his wife and two daughters, sailed from Portsmouth on his navy’s newest battleship, HMS Vanguard, on what would be his last imperial tour to South Africa, where he was still officially recognised as king. The military correspondent of the New York Times, Hanson Baldwin, put it in terms of world strategy. He argued that Europe was now too vulnerable as a base in the age of the atom bomb and ballistic missile. South Africa, far from the threat posed by the superpowers, might be the answer for Britain, which could develop the country’s mineral resources and restore itself to ‘its historic position as the arbiter of world destinies’.
George VI’s legacy to his daughter was the Commonwealth. Her father firmly believed that the monarchy still had a role to play outside the United Kingdom.26 It was a belief that Elizabeth would cling to when she became queen. In a speech delivered during the royal tour of South Africa on 21 April 1947 to mark her coming of age, Elizabeth said, ‘I declare before you all that my whole life … shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong.’ Elizabeth’s passion for Africa would eventually be the cause of major conflict with Margaret Thatcher, and push her towards a very public constitutional crisis.
Given that Elizabeth was in line for such a large and potentially troublesome inheritance, she never went to school. The future queen’s education was left mostly to a few devoted governesses such as Marion Crawford, and even she complained that the princess’s mother constantly interfered with her education, taking both her and her sister away from study for more frivolous diversions. While the scholarship girl, Margaret Roberts, had been studying hard to get into Oxford, the academic demands made on the princess were very modest, and there were few books in the classroom at Windsor Castle. Education was an alien concept to the Windsor family, compared to dogs and horses. Queen Elizabeth, the future queen mother, was determined to duplicate the happy childhood created for her by her mother, Cecilia, Countess of Strathmore, who didn’t believe her children’s enjoyment should be spoilt by too many lessons.
During her childhood, the queen mother inhabited a world where good manners and femininity were acceptable substitutes for actual knowledge. At Glamis Castle in Scotland and St Paul’s Walden, a grand country house in Hertfordshire where she grew up, life had been idyllic, relaxed and given over to innocent pleasures. As a child, she was once even allowed to bring her Shetland pony into the house for a joke.
Things had almost changed when a governess, Fraulein Kübler, arrived at the Strathmores’ London home to prepare the future queen mother for her basic school examinations. Horrified at the enormous gaps she found in Lady Elizabeth’s education she studiously attempted fill them in, with little success. ‘We worked at such a pace that Lady Elizabeth grew pale and thin.’
Lady Elizabeth immediately started to complain, ‘I do hate my lessons, and [become] sicker every day of this beastly exam. I know less and less.’ There is no surprise in how Lady Strathmore reacted.
‘Her mother made us stop,’ Fraulein Kübler wrote, ‘and said with a smile, “Health is more important than examinations”.’27
Predictably, the future queen mother never achieved a basic school certificate, but what Lady Strathmore managed to instill in her daughter was self-confidence. Exams, to women of her class and era, were just irrelevant. It was a policy she would carry forward with her daughter, despite the fact that she was potentially a queen-in-waiting.
In 1930, the royal family decided on the publication of a full-length biography of Elizabeth, then just 3 years old. The Story of Princess Elizabeth appeared with ‘the sanction of her parents’ and was written by Anne Ring, a former member of the royal household. The little book offered its readers such oozing drivel as:
From the moment of her birth not only has our little princess been wrapped about with the tender love of parents and devoted grandparents … but she has been the admiring object of affection from thousands in the country and beyond the seas who have never seen her.
A description of her bedtime read:
When Princess Elizabeth’s nurse descends to the morning room or the drawing room, and says in quiet tones, ‘I think it is bedtime now, Elizabeth’ there are no poutings or protests, just a few joyous skips and impromptu dance steps, a few last minute laughs at Mummy’s delicious bedtime jokes, and then the Princess Elizabeth’s hand slips into her nurse’s hand, and the two go off gaily together across the deep chestnut pile of the hall carpet to the accommodating lift, which in two seconds has whisked them off to the familiar dear domain, which is theirs to hold and to share.
Not surprisingly, Wallis Simpson would later refer to Elizabeth as ‘Shirley Temple’, when such grovelling nonsense was being published about her as she was growing up.
This laxity was allowed because the queen’s father, George VI, suffered a miserable childhood at the hands of nurses and tutors which left him a stammering wreck. He rarely saw his parents, and when he did it was an experience of anguish rather than pleasure. His mother, Queen Mary, was stiff and majestic. Bertie, as he was known in childhood, was only the second son: the ‘spare heir’. Early difficulties were exacerbated by a nursery nurse who adored his older brother, but exhibited callous antipathy towards him. She didn’t bother to feed him properly, and he developed serious digestive problems and a speech impediment which would stay with him for the rest of his life.28 Queen Mary failed to notice all this until the harm had been done.
As time went by, things failed to improve. At 6, he was turned over to a tutor named Mr Hansell who attempted to correct the fact that he was left-handed, which was at that time viewed as being a sign of maladjustment, rebellion and moral failing. This only caused Bertie’s stutter to get worse, and the schoolroom became a never-ending reminder of how inadequate he was. Even in his bedroom, he couldn’t escape. He was knock-kneed, so doctors fitted him with splints that he had to wear most days and every night.29
In frustration, he would burst into violent temper explosions that became known as his ‘gnashes’.30 At 14, this unfortunate little boy was sent into the Royal Navy College for Cadets on the Isle of Wight, notwithstanding the fact he suffered from sea sickness and was almost pathologically shy. For most of his brief naval career, he was confined to the sick room with either acute depression or whooping cough.31 Again the unfavourable comparisons to his brother always followed him. One contemporary wrote, ‘Like comparing an ugly duckling to a cock pheasant’.32 Although Bertie came to accept this as a fact of life, it hurt him deeply. Even the love of his wife and two daughters never fully eradicated his inferiority complex. He confessed to the prime minister’s wife, Mrs Baldwin, how all his life he had been compared to his brilliant brother33 and ‘there had been times when as a boy he had felt envious that eighteen months should make so much difference’.34
With both Elizabeth’s parents alienated at an early age by their education, it was left to her grandmother, Queen Mary, to take charge. Many historians go so far as to attribute the survival of the British monarchy during the first half of the twentieth century to Queen Mary. At this time, many European monarchies, such as the Romanovs in Russia, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Hohenzollerns in Germany, were swept aside by war and revolution.
Although never a natural mother, she ruled the family with firmness and determination. When she was Princess of Wales, her father-in-law, Edward VII, ordered her to read all the official red boxes containing the government papers so that she would thoroughly understand the business of monarchy. It was a remarkable honour to involve a German woman so closely in government. Consequently, Queen Mary developed an uncanny understanding of the British people, and embodied the formidable ideals of middle-class womanhood. She persuaded the public that the royal family were ‘just like us’ and maintained the prestige and influence of the monarchy by example and public service. To demonstrate her dedication, she spent the First World War touring hospitals and tended the wounded soldiers herself. She made sure that her sons saw active duty at the front. Edward VIII was sent to the muddy waterlogged trenches, and George VI to a gun turret at the Battle of Jutland. For most of her life, she henpecked her children to toe the royal line of duty.
Queen Mary was horrified to find that both her granddaughters were learning so little. She discovered that the 11-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the 6-year-old Princess Margaret had only ninety minutes a day in the school room, from 9.30 a.m. to 11.00 a.m. The syllabus only covered the basic ‘three Rs’ of reading, writing and arithmetic. The lax schedule was followed by an hour’s play and lunch, then another hour’s rest, followed by singing, music, drawing and dancing. When weather permitted, the girls were taken outside for an hour’s walk.35
There was a constant struggle between mother and grandmother. Queen Mary had a withering contempt for her daughter-in-law’s anti-intellectualism, and she also despised her flamboyance. She made sure that Lilibet understood that real queens are modest and sincere rather than players to the public gallery.36 Queen Mary decreed that Elizabeth would study history, with an emphasis on her family history; geography, with an emphasis on the British Empire; poetry for memory and religious studies so that she should understand her future role as Head of the Church.37
Sir Henry Martin, Vice Provost of Eton, was employed to instruct the princess on the British constitution.38 Queen Mary also personally conducted both girls on cultural tours of London, taking them to the Tower of London, the Royal Mint, the Bank of England, Hampton Court Palace, Kew Gardens and Greenwich. These were rather fleeting visits and Princess Margaret later swore that their grandmother would never allow her and her sister to see more than three pictures at a time. When they pleaded for just one more, Queen Mary would just march on.39
Surprisingly, Queen Mary stopped there. There were no exams, no other pupils for Elizabeth to test herself against competitively and no science education. The two queens and the king were concerned that their daughters might become ‘bluestockings’ (studious young women). Princess Margaret remained angry as she grew up that she never had the sophisticated education her intelligence required, and always blamed her mother for this failing.40 As a result, Princess Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, fifteen years later, virtually uneducated in all but the most rudimentary and basic disciplines. Neither university nor even finishing school was ever considered an option.41
To broaden her experience, she was sent to Girl Guides. However, rather than have her attend a normal pack, one was established in the gardens of Buckingham Palace on Wednesday afternoons. Its members were suitably vetted and included appropriately elevated girls of good breeding. In the winter, they met inside the palace, using its long corridors for signalling practice.42 It was a rarefied bubble, and a wide gulf existed between the life lived by the royal family and their subjects.
The Second World War did bring two advantages. One was the arrival of Antoinette de Bellaigue, a vivacious Belgian viscountess who taught both princesses French and a little German. The second was that, finally, in 1945 Lilibet was allowed become a soldier of sorts and joined the Auxiliary Transport Service. For those last few months of the war, Elizabeth drove a 3 ton truck, changed spark plugs, adjusted brakes, greased axles and switched tyres. However, she still led a privileged, closeted existence and was never subjected to the rough life the other young women faced in the service.43 While other girls slept in the army huts that constituted the barracks, she was driven back to Windsor Castle by 4 p.m. each day, and between lectures, she always ate in the officers’ mess and not with the lower ranks. However, she did occasionally escape to have cups of tea with the other women.44
Nothing illustrates Elizabeth’s cloistered life, cut off from the real world, better than her 16th birthday celebrations, when she was given a childlike tea party with jelly, ice cream and paper hats. A few people who attended, including her parents, sang ‘Happy Birthday Lilibet’ as though she were still a little girl.45 Marriage would be as much an escape for Elizabeth as it had been for Margaret Thatcher.
Probably the future queen’s biggest and only act of rebellion was over the choice of her husband. She met Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark at the outbreak of the war at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. At Christmas in 1943, Philip, who was on leave in England, was invited to attend the royal family’s annual pantomime at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth played the lead role as Aladdin and Margaret played Roxana. During the show Elizabeth leapt from a laundry basket dressed as a young Chinese boy, tap-dancing, singing and cracking jokes. She tried to persuade the 22-year-old Philip to join in the ‘fun’ but he refused.46 Then, he was interested in chasing more sophisticated women such as Georgina Wernher (now Lady Kennard), Deborah Mitford (later Duchess of Devonshire) and a Canadian called Osla Benning. He had played the field and taken them to places like Quaglino’s and the 400 Club.47
Philip’s romantic interest wasn’t encouraged by either the king or queen. Elizabeth’s mother had wanted her daughter to see many young men. She had even drawn up a so-called ‘cricket list’ or ‘First XI’ of suitable young English aristocratic men, including Sonny Blandford, the Duke of Marlborough, and Johnny Dalkeith, heir to the Duke of Buccleuch,48 who had also caught Margaret Thatcher’s attention at Oxford. Had the queen mother succeeded in her plan, Margaret and Elizabeth might have been in competition for the same man.
Behind the scenes, Philip was being encouraged by his highly ambitious uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to pursue the greatest ‘matrimonial catch’ in the whole of European royalty. The queen mother was very suspicious of Lord Mountbatten,49 she considered him ‘pushy’ and ‘left-wing’, something of a champagne socialist.50 Philip had a mind of his own, was good-looking and independent, the pin-up boy for bevies of private school girls. Their fascination with Philip spread like influenza.51 He totally lacked the courtly, understated manners of the English country gentleman, and palace courtiers found him ‘rough and uneducated’.52 Nor was Philip bound by the conventions that Princess Elizabeth slavishly observed. He was ‘not all over her, and she found that very attractive’.53
Prince Philip’s childhood could scarcely have been more different, at 8 years old his parents were exiled from Greece, where they had been part of a minor German-Danish royal family imported in 1863. Philip had no real home. His mother, Princess Alice, who spent eight years in German and Swiss mental sanatoria, suffered from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’.54 During the Second World War, Alice had been trapped in Athens where she helped rescue a Jewish family from the Gestapo. She eventually sold her jewels, became a nun and founded a convent, always struggling with her mental health. His philandering father, Prince Andrew, left her, to live with his mistress in Monte Carlo.
From the age of 8, until he was 15, Philip never saw his mother. Educated in Scotland at Gordonstoun, during the holidays he was parcelled around various family members. In England, he often stayed with the Mountbattens, or else he visited the various palaces and country houses of his family scattered across Europe – his four sisters had each married German princes. At school, he was a natural leader, becoming head boy before he joined the Royal Navy, where he distinguished himself at the Battle of Matapan. He was mentioned in dispatches for bravery.
The queen mother, along with many in the royal household, thought of him as a bit of a gatecrasher, ‘the Prince of Nothing, the Prince of Nowhere’. Margaret Rhodes, one of the queen mother’s nieces, regarded Philip as ‘a foreign interloper out for the goodies’. Princess Margaret said to friends that he simply was not good enough for her sister.55 He had no money and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, paid all his bills at Gieves, where naval officers went for their uniforms. At Sandringham for Christmas, he wore heavily repaired hand-me-down clothes from his father and even had to borrow a bow tie.56
There was a fascinating standoff between the British Establishment’s old guard and the young officer. He never showed them the respect an English boy would have done.57 The Eldon, Stanley and Salisbury families, who were close friends of the king and queen, ganged up against him and made it plain that they hoped they were not going to let their daughter marry ‘Charlie Kraut’.58 One of the fiercest opponents of the match was the queen mother’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon, who did his best to influence his sister against Philip.59 The aristocracy surrounding the royal family did what they often did to any outsider, they closed ranks, something at which the British upper class has always been adept.
Finally, during a holiday at Balmoral in August 1946, Philip asked the 19-year-old Elizabeth to marry him, although her father was firmly against the match, she said. At first their engagement was kept a secret. George VI was anxious for his beloved Lilibet, and wary of his future son-in-law’s man-about-town reputation.
Lord Mountbatten believed the king’s devotion to his daughter had become too obsessive, even unhealthy.60 His Majesty was miserable about the prospect of letting her go, and dreaded losing her; she was his constant companion in everything, work, shooting, walking and riding. He considered that Elizabeth was not only too young, but too unworldly, and was troubled that she had essentially fallen in love with the first young man who courted her.61 Both the king and queen felt Philip was ‘ill-tempered’ and ‘probably would not be faithful’.62
However, Louis Mountbatten wasn’t going to be put off. Ever plotting to advance the royal romance in favour of his nephew, this intriguer telephoned his other nephew, King George II, who had just been returned to the Greek throne after a successful plebiscite, and suggested that the restored ruler leak the news of the engagement to the press. The story broke on 7 September 1946, in the New York Times. King George VI was furious with Philip, Louis Mountbatten and the Greek King; as he put it ‘All those bloody Greeks’.63
The king fell back on a technique his daughter would later use as queen: delaying tactics. A royal tour was planned to South Africa, thus ensuring a long, forced separation from Philip. But Elizabeth was steadfast, and it became obvious to the king that he could no longer stand in the way of his daughter’s wishes. However, he remained suspicious of Philip and refused him the title of ‘Prince of the United Kingdom’. It would be a whole decade before he was given the full British royal title in 1957 by letters patent from his wife.
After the wedding at Westminster Abbey, the young couple honeymooned at Broadlands, the country estate of Mountbatten, or ‘Uncle Dickie’ as he became known. Mountbatten had plotted, planned and pushed for eight years to bring the couple together.64 He had finally married his nephew into the British royal house.
For such a profoundly introverted girl, it was a breath of fresh air to be married to a man who didn’t give a fig for the household at Buckingham Palace and their stuffy protocol. One diplomat, who was with them in Athens in 1950, talked to royal biographer Graham Turner and said:
Both my wife and I felt that he [Philip] brought her out. She was very shy, rather withdrawn, a bit of a shrinking violet in fact, and he was young and vigorous and jollied her along … she had a protective shell around her, and he brought her out of it.65
When George VI died in 1952, the queen mother, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill united against Philip. Both disliked his German roots and loathed his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, whom they felt had been an inadequate viceroy in India. The rest of the royal household took their lead. The new young queen, only in her mid-twenties, now had the world-famous prime minister as her adviser, and she was overwhelmed by him, allowing herself to be directed by him in everything. Her husband Philip was knocked sideways and struggled to find a role for himself.66
Within days of the king’s funeral, a row also broke out over the royal family name. Would the new queen use her husband’s name of Mountbatten, or her father’s name of Windsor? When Queen Victoria had married Prince Albert, the family name changed from Hanover to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which remained the royal surname until George VI changed it to Windsor to avoid anti-German feelings after the First Word War. Queen Mary heard that Louis Mountbatten had boasted that since the accession of his niece-in-law, the ‘house of Mountbatten reigned’. However, both the queen mother and Queen Mary, together with Churchill and the royal household, came down against any ‘Mountbatten pretensions’.67
The queen, constitutionally obliged to take the advice of her prime minister, proclaimed the family name would remain Windsor.68 Philip was furious, ‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.’ It clearly remained a sore point for years and reduced Elizabeth to tears on occasion.69 Even at the coronation, his role was undermined. Thanks to the scheming of Tommy Lascelles, the queen’s private secretary, he wasn’t allowed to walk with her down the aisle of Westminster Abbey. He was in the procession as her subject, not beside her, as her mother had been with King George at his coronation.70
Born with itchy feet, Philip at times hated his job as the Queen’s consort and being tied on a royal leash. In the heart of London’s infamous Soho he partied with the so-called Thursday Club, whose members included actors such as David Niven, Peter Ustinov, Jack Hedley, society photographer Baron Nahum and other members of the jet set, including Aristotle Onassis and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Former Labour Foreign Secretary, David Owen, described Prince Philip as going ‘pretty fairly wild’.71
By 1956 he had had a bellyful of ‘pomping’, as he referred to court protocol, and left on a four month trip on the royal yacht, Britannia, with its crew of 275, visiting Gambia, the Seychelles, Malaya, New Guinea, New Zealand, Antarctica, the Falklands, the Galapagos Islands, Australia and the West Coast of the United States, with his close friends, equerry Michael Parker and society photographer Baron Nahum. Presented to the public as a ‘diplomatic mission’ the entire trip was dogged by rumours of romantic trysts and a freewheeling lifestyle away from the palace. They sat on the deck sunbathing and drinking gin. The press slammed the trip as ‘Philip’s folly’ and asked, ‘who pays for it?’
When news of Michael Parker’s imminent divorce was leaked to the press on the grounds of alleged adultery, the old guard at the palace forced his resignation. While the British press remained restrained, it was left to the American press to spread the bad news with headlines such as ‘London Rumors of Rift in Royal Family Growing’.72 Various articles linked Michael Parker’s resignation to whispers that the queen’s husband had more than a passing interest in an unmarried woman and met her regularly in the apartment of his close friend, Baron Nahum. The press concluded that the real reason for the four month cruise was that Philip was ‘being got out of the country to cool down’. The queen put on a brave face.
George VI had left behind him a monarchy that was stable and surprisingly unaltered by the vast social changes that swept through Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. This was a not inconsiderable legacy to bequeath to a daughter determined to keep it all safe. However, he had an instinctive reliance on fossilised traditions, which he preserved while the rest of Britain declined.73 Since his death, Elizabeth has followed the royal script written by him. Her philosophy and values of duty, service and self-restraint are what her father ordained. She tenaciously adhered to royal practices and protocol which, by 1980, seemed increasingly outmoded.74 Surrounded by wealthy old Etonians and propertied ex-Guards officers she has shown a strong reluctance to step outside her class in any of her social relations.75
Although some reforms did happen, they were largely cosmetic and couldn’t conceal the fact the queen had all the conventional prejudices of her class. With so much vested interest in the status quo, she was bound to resist real reform and modernisation.76 Throughout the 1980s, Elizabeth II continued to turn her back on change, which came in the form of the Murdoch press, the cult of Princess Diana, and Thatcherism.
It was an attack launched by the Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, who cast her personality so forcibly on the decade from 1979 to 1989 that, in many ways, proved the most destabilising. Thatcher once referred to herself as ‘the rebel in charge of an Establishment government’.77
The queen and Mrs Thatcher were never going to agree. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was the most famous woman in the world until Margaret Hilda Thatcher came along. Not since Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots had two ‘queen regnants’ lived in the British Isles, a regal state of affairs which ended very badly for one of them.
Mrs Thatcher would become far more than a mere politician. In newspaper cartoons she was depicted as the emblem of Britain itself: Britannia, a goddess, resplendent with trident and shield, wearing a centurion’s helmet. For over a decade, during which the country had a more compelling icon to love or despise, Elizabeth II was overshadowed. The biggest threat to the monarchy came not from the Left, but from the Right,78 from another woman who favoured pearls and a handbag, who curtsied very deeply, and who made ‘Thatcherism’ the defining word of the eighties.
1 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
2 The Diamond Queen, Andrew Marr (Macmillan, 2011).
3 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
4 David Starkey’s Monarchy: The Windsors, Documentary, Channel 4.
5 The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Lady Colin Campbell (Dynasty Press, 2012).
6 Ibid.
7 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
8 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
9 David Starkey’s Monarchy: The Windsors, Documentary, Channel 4.
10 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
11 Ibid.
12 Speech, House of Commons, 11 February 1952.
13 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
14 Nicholson, Balliol, 6 April 1955.
15 David Starkey’s Monarchy: The Windsors, Documentary, Channel 4.
16 Ibid.
17 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
18 Our Own Dear Queen, Piers Brendon (Secker & Warburg, 1986).
19 Ibid.
20 This I Remember, Eleanor Roosevelt (Greenwood Press, 1975).
21 Our Own Dear Queen, Piers Brendon (Secker & Warburg, 1986).
22 Ibid.
23 The Little Princesses: The Story of the Queen’s Childhood by her Nanny, Marion Crawford, Marion Crawford (Orion, 2003).
24 Our Own Dear Queen, Piers Brendon (Secker & Warburg, 1986).
25 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
26 Ibid.
27 The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Lady Colin Campbell (Dynasty Press, 2012).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
31 The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Lady Colin Campbell (Dynasty Press, 2012).
32 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
33 Ibid.
34 A Diary with Letters, 1931–1950, Thomas Jones (Oxford, 1954).
35 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
36 The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Lady Colin Campbell (Dynasty Press, 2012).
37 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
38 The Diamond Queen, Andrew Marr (Macmillan, 2011).
39 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
40 The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Lady Colin Campbell (Dynasty Press, 2012).
41 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
42 Ibid.
43 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
44 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
45 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
46 Ibid.
47 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
51 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
52 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
53 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
59 Ibid.
60 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
61 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
62 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
63 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
64 Ibid.
65 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
66 Ibid.
67 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
68 Ibid.
69 The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor, A.N. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 1993).
70 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
71 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
72 The Baltimore Sun, 8 February 1957.
73 Our Own Dear Queen, Piers Brendon (Secker & Warburg, 1986).
74 Ibid.
75 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
76 Our Own Dear Queen, Piers Brendon (Secker & Warburg, 1986).
77 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
78 Article by Gordon Rayer, Daily Mail, 2 December 2011.